fayley
Good prices - unadvertised shipping delay - credit card authorisation
I was thrilled with the discounted prices and made my order quickly to allow time for the goods to ship from US to Australia. Not advertised is a payment authorization. About 12 hours after I ordered and paid I got an email saying I have to authorize the payment. I have two options FIRST OPTION : I can call my bank and get a secret number (ANZ tells me that the US and Europe use a hidden reference number for authorisations that aren't visible to Australian banks). SECOND OPTION : they have made a small refund to my credit card, if I can tell them how much then this is considered authorisation. This is the option I went with and it took 5 days to clear, meaning my order will arrive just days after my hiking trip. Fabulous . When they finally released my order, they found that one of the items was on back order! How can that be? They had known about my order for a good 5 days, it should have been in by then ... clearly they didn't even look at my order until the payment was authorised. The stock level on the website said IN STOCK, and I checked with them that they would not give my stock to someone else while they did the "authorisation". So at this point my decision is to either have my order either delayed EVEN MORE or cancel it from my order (which I did), but it was really the cheapest supplier, and shipping is only free on really big orders. I'm really very annoyed at this extra authorisation. I thought I had found the best site ever (massive range, fantastic prices, great to navigate) and it turns out to be a dud. Maybe its for the best, I was spending too much money on hiking and camping gear anyway. Maybe if you use PayPal instead of Credit Card it would be a better experience, although I don't use PayPal because of all the scam PayPal emails going around.